For those of you who think that the Samsung Galaxy S line’s 1GHz processor speed isn’t enough for you, you’ll be glad to know that the original Galaxy S and Captivate have been successfully overclocked to 1.2 GHz. But what’s more interesting is that the Hummingbird processor can apparently be overclocked to a battery-draining 1.6GHz!

The possibility of getting the Galaxy S running at 1.6 GHz is, for now, just a theory. The Hummingbird processor found on all of the Galaxy S variants should be able to support it, but it just hasn’t reached its full potential at this point. Still, screaming processor speed aside, it’s not clear what effect this level of overclocking will have on the device’s battery life, or overall stability is up for question. And, it’s important to note that overclocking can be dangerous to your device’s health.

Sure, it’s hard not to see the appeal of having your smartphone run at the speed of most netbooks today. It definitely sounds appealing, but I’m not sure how appealing it is to possibly have your once shiny Galaxy S turn into a lifeless paperweight.

For now, if you’re looking to overclock your Galaxy S (i9000) or Samsung Captivate, you can use the existing method that will get you up to 1.2 GHz. How much would .2 GHz boost performance? Just take a look at the picture above. The Captivate hit a 2547 benchmark in Quadrant while using the 1.2 GHz overclock hack, and we couldn’t even begin to think of what the score might look like if the bad boy was running at 1.6 GHz.

Let’s hope one of the crazy smart devs over at XDA can cook something up for the tinkerers out there. Even if this does become possible, it will likely take a while before the hack is actually useful. The hack needs to be stable (enough), and battery issues will need to be addressed, if they can keep the thing from dying within an hour of use to begin with. If overclocking isn’t your style, we might suggest you to wait out for the HTC Ace, as it’s rumored to come with a 1.3 GHz CPU from the factory.